The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A linked list is a data structure that includes a sequence of entries each of which contains a reference to another entry, typically another entry in a sequential manner. Linked lists are used in various computer and networking applications. In a switching device, for example, a linked list identifies resources, such as ports, at the physical layer, through which the data may be transmitted. At times one or more subsets of the full linked list need to be identified. Conventionally, different liked lists are created for the various different subsets of resources that are defined within a system.
In a network example, a full link list includes all of the active network ports in a particular network. A subset includes only some of the ports, such as, for example, ports that are associated with a particular group, for instance a division or a department within an organization, that may receive multicast transmissions. A particular multicast group may include ports that are exclusively in that multicast group. Alternatively, the particular multicast group may include ports that are also members in a different multicast group. In other examples, linked lists are provided for other resources, such as clients on a network, different software applications that are available for use, and the like.